Jurors Select Winning Redesigns of 200 Park Avenue Facade

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Metals in Construction magazine and the Ornamental Metal Institute of New York named six winning teams for its 2016 Design Challenge yesterday at the Times Center in New York City. “Reimagine a New York City Icon” challenged designers and engineers to reclad 200 Park Avenue in New York City — formerly known as the Pan Am Building, now the MetLife Building — with a resource-conserving, eco‐friendly, highly transparent enclosure that preserves the building’s heritage.

200 Park Avenue opened in 1963 as the world’s largest corporate structure. Like many mid-century buildings, it suffers today from an underperforming facade. Inspired by the President’s Climate Action Plan and the Architecture 2030 Challenge, the competition recognizes the role retrofitting our existing building stock plays in reducing energy consumption.

“The competition was conceived to explore ways of retrofitting existing facades for high performance when preservation and innovation are competing priorities,” said Gary Higbee, AIA, director of industry development for the Ornamental Metal Institute of New York and editor of Metals in Construction magazine, in a statement. “Recladding a building can give it a new visual identity and radically improve its energy performance in the process. But how do you address this with recognized landmarks? The answers we received in the form of submissions were full of innovative concepts, but also underscored how crucial it is for architects and engineers to work together to find successful solutions.”

Winning teams include members from firms AECOM, CASE-RPI, Dagher Engineering, Ecosystem, FXFOWLE, Heintges, Lemay, Sefaira, SHoP, StudioTJOA, Thornton Tomasetti, VOA, Volley Studio and Werner Sobek. $15,000 in prize money was distributed equally among them.